The Ancients - Roman Roads

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

Do all roads lead to Rome? We find out in today's episode all about one of the Roman Empire's greatest legacies - it's web-like network of roads and route-ways. From the famous Via Appia, the longest road in mainland Italy, to Watling Street, the road on which Boudica was defeated, Rome's roads left an indelible mark on the territories their centurions conquered.But what do we actually know about these ancient streets and pathways? What was road travel like back in Roman times? And most importantly, what was their equivalent of a service station?To explain all this and much more Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Catherine Fletcher, author of a new book called The Roads to Rome. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscriptionVote for The Ancients in the Listeners Choice category of British Podcast Awards here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, where we are covering one of the great legacies of the Roman Empire,

the road system that criss-crossed it, which you can still see the remains of today. From the famous Via Appia, the most prestigious Roman road of them all, that connected Rome, the Eternal City and Brindisi, that port town at the heel of Italy, to the roads that were built all across Roman Britain. Go almost anywhere in what was the Roman Empire and you'll be able to find traces of its road network. So we've all heard that Rome was famous for its road building, but what do we actually know about these ancient routeways? Did all roads really lead to Rome? And what was road

travel like back in Roman times? What was their equivalent of the service station? How dangerous were the roads? To explain all this and much more, our guest is Dr Catherine Fletcher, who has recently written a book all about Roman roads and their importance throughout history. I really do hope you enjoy. Catherine, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Delighted to be here. What a topic. I can't believe we haven't covered this topic in the past. Too easy to overlook, but one of the keystones of what we think about the Romans for.

Their roads. Now, they weren't the first people to create these great roads, were they? And yet they've become a symbol, an emblem of Rome and its greatness. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are roads around beforehand. Obviously, people had to get from A to B. The Romans in certain parts of Italy, as they expanded, were taking over existing road networks, for example, in Etruria to the north of Rome, what's now Tuscany, roughly speaking. There are already roads there. There are towns on a grid pattern and so forth. You also have the example of the Royal Road over in Persia between Susa and Sardis. So yeah, the Romans are not entirely original, but they do some very original things in their road building that I'm sure we'll come on to.

We absolutely will. And one of the first questions which I always ask whenever we cover any of these topics is source material for approaching this massive topic. Now, I appreciate we've got the roads themselves, but what types of source material do you have to learn more about the Romans and their roads and the importance of these roads for them? So obviously, there's the roads themselves. There's quite a lot of archaeology around the roads. So for example, you can go to the tiny town of Wall on the A5 today, and Wall has the remains of an ancient Roman service station, a mansio. It's a bit like the Roman equivalent of a travel lodge and a stopping off point. So it's got a little hotel. It's got some baths. It's got stables. You would be able to change your horses there when you were on the road, when you were

going along Watling Street. So we got that kind of archaeology that supports understanding exactly what some of this infrastructure of the imperial roads looked like. We've also got various literary sources. So we've got poetry, we've got Horace writing about his dreadful journey down the Via Appia and sort of complaining about boatmen and how they're all shouting. And so we've got entertaining bits and pieces like that. We've got various sort of histories that tell us about the state of the roads. We've got some descriptions of road building processes. We've got the law later on, sort of all the kind of regulations. And we've got some remarkable sort of votive tablets where people are giving thanks to the gods for having a safe journey. So all in all, when we stack all these things up, it is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle

to piece it together. There's quite a lot of detail out there. I mean, it absolutely is. And I love that you mentioned in passing, you know, that archaeology that you can use, that isn't just the roads themselves. And I think that's something just let's say if we did an episode on Hadrian's Wall, the story of Hadrian's Wall is not just the wall and the story of the Roman roads are not just the roads themselves. It's these various structures and places that were alongside these great roads. these various structures and places that were alongside these great roads. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact is that once you have a good road connection in place,

you can do all sorts of things with it. So roads and the presence of a road actually favours development of commerce, it favours the growth of towns. A settlement that happens to be close to a road has a real advantage over one that is not so close to a road. And although I think sometimes we can exaggerate the significance of the roads as a transport mechanism because obviously, the Mediterranean is the center of the Roman Empire. River transport is really important, but to get to your nearest river or to get to your nearest seaport, you need a road connection. nearest seaport, you need a road connection. It's no good. You can't just magic your produce or your amphorae or olive oil or whatever it is from A to B. You have to move it somehow to get it onto its ship to send it wherever it's going. I also want to ask, when we think of a Roman road, should we predominantly be thinking about paved roads?

Not necessarily, I think is the basic answer. There are quite a lot of examples of paved roads, but certainly a lot of the longer distance ones. Even the Via Appia, when it was first made, probably begins as a little bit more of a beaten track, topped not with those famous big paving stones, but with glarea. Glarea is a little bit more like a modern tarmac. It's gravel that is packed into the top layer of the road, and that makes it easier for wheeled transport than something that's just purely beaten earth. But it's not that perfect sort of image that a lot of people have in their head of paving stones absolutely everywhere.

And the paving stones also look different from place to place because Romans are quite adaptable. They use the local stone that's available. They try and fit into the appropriate geography. So some soil needs different foundations than others. If it's marshy, it needs a lot more work to keep the road up. So yeah, it's a little bit more flexible than just this idea that Romans have one model of a road and it's dead straight and it's paved with these round chunks. Yeah, Roman roads are not uniform, as you say, depending on where you were in the empire. And of course, because the Roman empire lasts for centuries, about a millennia, isn't it? So I'm guessing also in the story of the Roman roads, you see a lot of evolution in their design too. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a good example here is actually the Via Appia. So the Appia is obviously the famous one, the queen of the roads, as it's called by Statius. The Appia

goes from Rome to Brindisi. So the Adriatic port of Brindisi, and that's important because then it would eventually connect by a sea crossing to another road that goes all the way to Byzantium or Constantinople, the Via Ignatia. But the Appia is first constructed a little just over 300 years before Christ. It's full length to Brindisi about 250 BC. But after a few centuries, the Emperor Trajan decides this road is getting a bit worn out and he commissions his own variation on it, which is the Via Traiana, Trajan's road. That runs a little way to the north by Benevento, but it basically does the same route. So even within the period of Roman rule, you get major roads first being built and then being basically replaced.

Well, I'd like to ask a bit more about the road network in Italy, first of all, Catherine. Let's say in the early stages of Rome, as it's growing as a power during the Republic and before it really becomes this great Mediterranean power, do we know what the purpose of the early road network in Italy is all about? Is it very much Rome is the heart and all of these different roads start appearing to connect various parts of Italy and to further consolidate Roman control over the Great Peninsula. Yes, I think there's a mix of military routes, consolidating alliances, really bringing together and connecting the different elites of Italy. Take the Via Appia again. One of its first stopping points just on the kind of north edge of

the Bay of Naples is Terracina. That was a Roman army colony. Terracina kind of is a nice example here. It's a very kind of pretty place. It's near what will be a coast with lots of gorgeous imperial villas on it. This is, as anybody who's been to Pompeii knows, this area is the sort of where the wealthy Romans have their seaside houses. So there's a connecting idea there about bringing together, leading people in these cities together. Roads are very useful for anybody who needs to go to Rome on political business, for example, who needs to go to Rome to deal with kind of trade. But if you're just an ordinary person going about your business, you perhaps don't need a long distance road so much. So a lot of the value of the roads is perhaps for those people who are interested in that exchange of political power. They are the people

who are really getting most out of them. And of course, it's also the people who can afford wheeled transport rather than just riding a horse or a donkey or such like, because they could go on any type of road. Because it does beg the question, obviously, with Rome, you've got Ostia there, the port and maritime trade must be very, very important. But how important would you argue that the creation of this great complex road network across Italy is for the growth of Rome during those earlier stages of the Roman Empire? for the growth of Rome during those earlier stages of the Roman Empire? I think the road network does two different things. I think one is that it's functional.

So it gets people from A to B, it gets goods from A to B, helps consolidate the military control, because in a sense, even if the Roman army doesn't actually move from A to B very quickly along a road, the fact that people knew it could in theory is possibly a deterrent to staging a rebellion or such like. So even when it's not used, its presence kind of helps with imperial control. But it also has this sense of softer power in that it makes a statement, the Romans are here. Roman roads have milestones, for example, which other roads don't have milestones. And the milestones will tell you, sometimes they'll tell you how far away you are from a certain place. Sometimes they just tell you who the emperor currently is. So it's as much about making a political statement of whose road this is,

who it belongs to, who's in charge here. And there are actually some great examples of milestones where they've had one name of an emperor written originally, and then that emperor has been subject to a damnatio memoriae, his name has been scraped off, and we put up a whole milestone next to it with the different emperor who's now in charge. But the whole infrastructure of the roads helps to make a statement, a cultural statement about the power of Rome that goes beyond just the fact that the roads are on a functional level useful. I have one more question before I like to venture beyond Italy and explore. Well, of course, we're in Britain, so I think the name Watling Street will come up and a couple of others

too, Catherine. But I'd like to ask, first of all, you mentioned, of course, the Appian Way, and you said that the Queen of Roads, as it's described. Why is it called the Appian Way of all names? Well, I mean, this is after it's the person who originally commissioned it, Appius Claudius Caicus or Caicus. My pronunciation tends to fluctuate between English, Latin, Latin, Italian, Latin, excuse me. So Appius Claudius was one of the first people to give his name to a road. He actually commissioned this road. He was responsible for various commissions. He also commissioned an aqueduct. He was a kind of patron of great works. And in a way, that idea that the Roman consuls give their names to roads, and therefore they just really sort of memorialize

themselves in the process, is part of the deal. And it's so fascinating because later on, as you see many modern figures copying this idea, there is, and later on, there is Charlemagne gets credited for a road which he didn't actually build. Napoleon really wants to take credit for building lots of roads. Mussolini names a road after himself. I mean, there's all these different individuals who try and copy this idea that what you do if you're a kind of great man following classical precedent is to go around and build some roads and put your name on them. So this is something that, yeah, has a huge kind of heritage going down the centuries. Well, exploring that more, let's use the Via Appia as a case study, actually.

Let's say Appius Claudius and you've decided, as one of the most powerful men in Rome at that time, that you're going to oversee the build of this great road. I mean, do we know much about the next steps? Would there have been these architects who would have then overseen the construction of the road? Do we know much about how they would have built a road like the Via Appia? Well, there's quite a lot of debate about this and the technicalities of how exactly you do the surveying is not absolutely settled in the literature, but certainly there is an idea that the surveying methods are associated with an existing method that's used to parcel out sort of squares of land. So they're drawing on this idea of squaring off land for taxation purposes to be able to survey

the lines of the roads. Certainly, we don't know a lot of the names of the people involved. I mean, even with some of the consuls, the people who give their names to the roads, we just know, you know, they're such and such as sun. And that's the extent of the information we have about them. But as you go into some of the more spectacular engineering works, there are some examples of individuals where we know there are particular people responsible for tunnels, for example. And of course, there's this set of tunnels around the north of the Bay of Naples, the Cripton Napolitana, the Grotta di Coccheo and so forth. And these are attributed to this guy, Coccheus, after whom the cave, the Grotta is named. It's a tunnel though. And so, yeah,

in a handful of cases, we have specific named architects, engineers who are getting the credit. But most of the time, yeah, we have a limited understanding of the detail of the ins and outs of the planning. Well, you mentioned tunnels there. So let's kind of go into that tangent quickly, because of course, with these roads, as they're building these roads across Italy and then beyond, it's either wider Roman Empire, sometimes you'd have a massive hill or a mountain in the way. And the Romans, they decide to build these great architectural wonders, these tunnels through the mountainside. And as you say, in some cases, I've got in my notes here, the furlough tunnel, Catherine, because I know you mentioned it in

your book. And this is an extraordinary engineering achievement, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's quite hard to visualise. You have to think about this really, really narrow gorge between two mountains. This is a key pass through the Apennines going on the Via Flaminia, which goes between Rimini through the Apennines and then to Rome. So this tunnel, most of the time the road sort of comes along this pass and it's cut into the rock, what would have been probably halfway through a close to sheer cliff face. Now, when you see it, the bottom of the valley has actually been made into a reservoir. So the road feels quite close to sheer cliff face. Now, when you see it, the bottom of the valley has actually been made into a reservoir. So the road feels quite close to the water level, but actually it's quite a long

way up the mountain. So for a lot of the time, the road sort of hangs off the cliff almost as it goes along. But at a certain point, they hit a piece of rock, which they just have to tunnel through. they just have to tunnel through. And so there's a 40-meter tunnel on the side of this rock face made around the 220s BCE. So no electricity, no mechanical digging machines, everybody on the side of this cliff. I mean, it's an absolutely extraordinary piece of engineering to pull off. And it was in use until the 1980s. It was still a road, you can drive through it today, and it was still the main road until in the 1980s, they built a bypass, which sort of says something about the longevity of it. You go there today, there are sort of plaques by the side of it commemorating one of the Italian Wars of

Independence commemorating. And there's also, it's mentioned in the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who's from the 16th century. He went to Italy, he went to look at it because even then it was such a spectacular tourist attraction, even if you like. Do you think this highlights another key point of the roads and keep focusing on Italy for the moment, that the topography, the terrain of Italy, of course, is not all flat land everywhere. You've got the moment, that the topography, the terrain of Italy, of course, is not all flat land everywhere. You've got the mountains running down the centre and the Romans building these great roads

that connect east and west. They're almost showing that they have the architectural know-how, the engineering prowess, and the people who are ordering the construction of these roads, they have the power to gather together all of these people

and build these great constructions and almost, youions and almost triumph over nature in a way. Yes, absolutely. And I think the numbers are just quite extraordinary. So although we don't really have historical sources for this, there's one article by somebody who is a modern day transportation specialist. And he looked at how many people you might need to build the first 185 kilometers of the Via Appia. And he reckoned you would need between these people, I mean, roads are often built by the army during peacetime. There's some evidence of use of enslaved workers. Not so much the case, it's not so consistently recorded that we think that the army was doing it. But even so, the Appia is an exception to that. The Appia was mainly built by Roman freedmen and citizens. So just imagine you've got to pay all these people at least enough to kind of keep them going through some quite heavy labor. I mean,

that's an extraordinary amount of money. And they spend so much money on doing it that they have to issue new currency. So they're basically printing money, as it were, to try and cover the costs of these huge infrastructure projects. So it's a very, very big intervention. It makes a statement. It helps to consolidate Roman power across Italy. And you need to contend with that particular topography. And if you want to be able to march an army across it quickly, cutting these cuttings through, making the tunnels does really help

move your transport at a faster pace than you would if you were going around and around, which they do in some wider parts of the empire. We don't want to pretend that everywhere it was all cuttings and tunnels. It absolutely wasn't. But these things make a difference. Also, that idea of not thinking it's the same everywhere kind of leads me on to the question of the Roman fixation on having their roads as straight as possible. Now, Catherine, how much is that actually true? I mean, there are certainly some fantastic examples of the roads being as straight as possible. So if you look at, say, Foss Way in Gloucestershire, you've got a great example of a straight road. You look at places like Watling street going across

from roxeter there are some really quite straight sections of these roads i used to be when i was a kid and being driven around by my dad in our old car we would you know whenever we'd hit a particularly straight bit of road he'd always say it's probably a roman road now my dad was exactly the same idea how true this is but it's also the same. I don't know how true this is. But it's also the case that the Romans could be quite pragmatic. So they did not, when you're, for example, going on the bits of the Via Ignatia through what's now Albania, what would be Macedonia, and so on, there's a limit to how far you make that road absolutely dead straight. It's just not feasible to do it all the time.

And in some cases, particularly where you've got an existing smaller road, it can be more efficient just to follow the route of the existing road than to have to build an entirely new one. So yeah, I mean, there are some great examples of straight roads, the Via Appia, Foss Way and so forth. But yeah, we shouldn't assume that they're absolutely always going to be dead straight. I can absolutely guarantee that were the Roman roads really straight is going to be one of the key questions that you're going to be asked in interview after interview over the next few months, because that's one of the things

we always associate with Roman roads. Well, Catherine, let's move on from, let's go outside of Italy. And you mentioned the Fosway there. So let's go to Britain. Let's, let's move on from, let's go outside of Italy. And you mentioned the Fosse Way there. So let's go to Britain. Let's say it's post 43 AD, the Roman invasion force, and the initial invasion has ended. And now it's about consolidating Roman control on new territories. Do we kind of know the process of when Roman soldiers or Romans there, they start initiating the building of great roads in new places that they've recently conquered. A lot of the time, this is actually part of the process of conquest itself, because you

have to get your army up through the country. And so one of the things your army does, or rather gets its, in some cases, gets its captives to do, is to start cutting roads. Now, the detail of the British campaign, I'll be honest, is not something that I had time to deal with in detail in the book. But there's a really interesting bits from Tacitus. And listeners might know Tacitus, Intestus Agricola. There's a speech by Calchicus, he's the kind of Caledonian chieftain who's sort of talking about Roman tyranny. And he describes these people who are made to effectively cut through forest, bridging marshes and so on, going through this very hostile terrain at great costs to their own life and limb, having been taken captive by the Roman conquerors. And so this is a kind of

interesting hint at some of what might be going on, which we just don't have a lot of detail about in the source material. We know that this idea that Roman army is cutting through roads in order just to move itself forward. Also, perhaps they are getting their prisoners to do the same thing, enslaving people and then making them do the same thing. So yeah, the detail of exactly what happens when is not so sort of firm the ancient literature and the ancient source material. But I think there's an interesting kind of... What we do have does raise this kind of interesting question about who and how, and also about the response to it. Because I think one of the things we never hear much about is,

you know, perhaps contemporary criticism of the Rhodes. We go with them, this is a great engineering project, it's spectacular, it's brilliant. And what Tacitus does with that speech is just to hint that maybe not everybody was so into this as we might tend to think that there are people who are being made at considerable cost to themselves to participate in this project possibly by force so that's a one of the more interesting kind of sides of this whole story that we've got to imagine a bit how people might have thought or felt because we don't have a lot of detail. I mean, it is quite interesting to kind of speculate, isn't it? And perhaps those early roads during the invasion period itself built by captives and the like, and it seems that primarily

those roads are for a military purpose of, as you say, moving the army forward and connecting forts and so on. Is it over time as that province becomes more consolidated as Roman power those roads are for a military purpose of, as you say, moving the army forward and connecting forts and so on. Is it over time as that province becomes more consolidated, as Roman power is very much solidified there, that you then see, as you've hinted at earlier, soldiers during peacetime adding to that road network? And then soon enough, in this Roman province, you don't have just the military roads, you have a great crisscrossing of all these different roads in one place of the empire. Yeah, exactly. And as you see, I mean, all these Roman forts and so on, I mean, they're not isolated from the local population. They're trading with the local population. They need the local population to help them get stuff. They're

not necessarily entirely self-sufficient. They are trading, they are exchanging. And so that in turn changes the economy and the presence of these routes changes what is possible for local traders in terms of moving their produce, changes some of the shape of the settlement. So while it's kind of hard to be precise about exactly how that all plays out, It's definitely the case that these Roman roads aren't just after a while for military conquest, they also then acquire other functions. And probably do that quite quickly because quite quickly the Roman army needs to engage with the people who it's conquered just in order to be able to survive and function in the local area. Do you know of any Roman roads or Roman-inspired roads beyond the borders of their empire?

Let's say neighbouring powers, they see the roads and they're just like, oh, I'll have something similar. I don't know exactly about the neighbouring powers deciding to copy so much. But certainly, I mean, the Roman roads continue quite a bit further north than where we might typically think of as the borders. So you think of like Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall in Scotland, the Antonine Wall is in Falkirk. Well, you go sort of, what, 10 miles north of that to Stirling, this Roman road in one of the local parks in Stirling that's been excavated. You go further north to Dune and to Dune Castle. And these things are all marked on the Ordnance Survey maps, you can find them. There's a lot of Roman road that actually exists beyond the boundaries of the empire that we might normally think of. So certainly, they were using it to try and push forward. Perhaps local people were

interested in maintaining it for trading purposes. I don't really know what happened. We don't have lots of records, again, of exactly what's going on with all these spots of road in Caledonia. But that's an interesting example of the fact that this network is bigger than where we might normally think of the empire as stopping. Well, there are different levels to Roman roads. So you have the big kind of M1, like the Via Rapida, the massive roads in the heart of Italy, but other roads are smaller. Do we know much about that variation in size and scale of them? There are certainly the major long distance roads, and there are about eight of these major long distance roads that spiral out of Rome. And so we have the Via Aurelia, the Via Salaria,

the Via Flaminia, and so forth, the via Tiburtina, which goes to Tivoli, the via Ostienza, which goes to Ostia. So these big roads, leading off them, there are quite a lot of private roads. I mean, different groups locally have their own road connections that are not really the business of the Roman state. They're not the responsibility of the provincial governor to maintain, but they're roads that connect small local settlements with the major networks. So for example, I mean, in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, there's one plaque that marks a private road belonging to the Camilla tribe, for example. So we see these, and there are also other types of roads that are very important for moving sheep and goats. So the cales, and these are sheep production, lamb

production of wool, production of lamb to eat and so on, really important in the Roman Empire. And so there are also other routes that are used primarily by shepherds to move the flocks up and down off the mountains seasonally. So there are all these different types of road apart from just the kind of very big name ones that we think of, which are the equivalent of our motorways. Okay, the ancient Roman motorway and kind of keeping on animals and traffic because I can presume as these roads become more and more used as the centuries pass all across the empire from Italy to the borders of the empire as the Roman state sees this are there a number of laws that are introduced which kind of decide when let's say

wheeled transport can go down when they can't is there restrictions put in place to ensure that there isn't just a massive pile-up on these roads? There's a lot of detail, actually. I think there are 60-odd traffic laws by the 5th century listed in the Theodosian Code. So yeah, absolutely, there's quite a lot of regulation. There's regulation about how wide a road is meant to be so that you can make sure that two carts can pass on it. That's obviously in terms of the major roads, but yet there's also a lot of development of almost a public transport slash postal system under Augustus. And this is the cursus publicus, which is a system by which, first of all, it starts with soldiers running relays and passing on messages from one place to the other. But then

over the years, it expands to be a system where you can actually, if you are the type of person permitted to do this, essentially a government official or somebody authorized by a government official, you can take your messenger, can take wheeled transport all the way to a destination, which is particularly important because it allows for the delivery of confidential oral messages that you might not want to write down. So this postal service slash bus service, if you like, because you can put people and you can put things onto this public transport, is a really, really important early development. And it doesn't get replicated again until the 16th century after the fall of the Roman Empire. And even when it is replicated,

it's replicated on a national level. So in the 16th century, you get the King of France and you get the King of England, Henry VIII at that point sort of setting up their own national postal services. But the idea of a kind of cross imperial postal service is something that was pioneered under Augustus and doesn't come back for well over a millennium afterwards. That leads us nicely on to talking more about those places associated with the roads all across the empire. I know we focused largely on Italy and Britain, but of course, this road network, it stretched from places like Spain and Portugal all the way to Syria, didn't it? And actually, at its height, do we know just how extensive that road network was?

I mean, you've got a road running all along the North African coast. You've got connections down the Nile. You've got a road, the Via Augusta, which connects up Cadiz overland with Rome. So you can go right from the southern tip of Spain, all through places like Cordova and Valencia up to Tarragona, which is just outside Barcelona, incredible sort of Roman amphitheater there on the coast. And the Via Augusta, you can still see the signs, the street signs that say the Via Augusta are still there in Tarragona. You can walk down that road. There's loads of traffic and traffic lights on it now, but it's more or less the same road, the same route that then stretches all around the southern Mediterranean through places near connecting places like Nîmes and Arles and so on, on that coast. And then turning around down via Genoa, where you could get the

Via Aurelia down to Rome. So you can go all around the Mediterranean coast effectively, and then you can jump off the Via Appia. So you're in Rome, you take the Via Appia across the Italian peninsula down to Brindisi, take a ship across to Dores in what is now Albania, take a ship across to Derez in what is now Albania. And then you get on the Via Ignatia and you go through what's now Albania. You would go through a bit of what's now Macedonia, North Macedonia, into Greece, Thessaloniki, and you end up in Byzantium or Constantinople or Istanbul, depending on which time period you're in. So you can do all this stretch. And yes, well into Syria and a lot of that very far eastern end of the Roman road network, that's the bit that's been least excavated. So the experts on that kind of detail,

the eastern network are least sure about the precise details of exactly what's going on. But certainly, all across modern Turkey, down through the Holy Land, down around to Egypt, there are Roman roads. And we have quite a lot of detail, in fact, about those roads towards the end of the empire because Christian pilgrims start writing up their itineraries, and we get details of transport and what can be done from them. So that set of sources then sort of kicks in and we get a little bit more information about what's happening down in the eastern side of the Mediterranean. Absolutely. If we have time at the end, I'd love to ask a bit more about that and kind of emphasising, isn't it, it's not just goods and soldiers that are going along these roads,

it's also ideas too that are being passed from one end of the empire to the other. But let's put ourselves in the shoes of, I don't know, a family or group of people. They're going from Cadiz and let's say all the way to Rome. And you're going along these great roads, you're going over land. And we're walking along one of these roads, Catherine, at the height of the Roman empire. Now, first off, talk to us about, and you hinted at this earlier, the ancient travel lodge. These service stations that they had other roadside hostels are available, just to say as well. But talk to us, what do we know about these ancient Roman service stations? So we've really got two different types of stopping off point that are marked on the itineraries. And so we get our information about these primarily from these lists like the Antonine itinerary.

There's also a set of itineraries on four silver cups that were found in the 1850s, sort of dumped with a whole big votive deposit a bit sort of in north of Rome. And now in one of the museums in Rome, in Palazzo Massimo, there's the Vicarello cups. So we have these lists to work from. And so really you have something that's a little bit more the equivalent of a petrol station, and that's a mutatio. A mutatio is a kind of from the name, from the mutare to change. And that's where you can change horses.

So horses don't really want to do really, really, really long distances. It's a much more efficient means of transport if you can ride for, say, 20 odd miles in a day, and then you swap your horses, you get fresh horses. You can do a different leg of the journey the next day. So the mutate is quite a basic stopping off point, but then you also have the manseo. And the manseo is more sophisticated. Then you also have the mansio. And the mansio is more sophisticated. It's probably got some accommodation for people to stay over. It will have stables.

It will have some baths so you can clean up. It will have food, all these kind of things so that a traveler can refresh themselves as they go on their way. And there are a number of these that have been excavated. Obviously, this is the one in Wall. There are a couple further east. There's one, I think it's in Bulgaria, and there's certainly one in Turkey that's been excavated. They're sort of two-story houses, if you like, with kind of accommodation for people on the top probably, and then the horses underneath. And you're probably staffing as well you know you've got lots and lots of animals in this setup because remember as an individual you probably got your own animal that you're riding on but you might also have pack transport so you've got

another horse that's carrying your luggage or a donkey that's carrying your luggage so there's a lot of mix of people and animals in these spaces i I really need to go and see that Bansia remains at Wold. I had very little knowledge of that at all, Catherine, but given how they were an ancient service station, I must go and have a look at that. Moving on, because also I guess they're very important, of course, for a place to stay for the night when you're exhausted after a day's travel. But I'm also guessing that the roads at night time,

that's not a place where you want to be. Were there almost ancient highwaymen there? Oh, yeah. People get really, really worried about bandits. There's actually one piece of writing which is about somebody going on the eastern side, I think through northern Greece, who is basically told by the innkeeper that he can't possibly start his journey before dawn because it's just too dangerous to do it. And so they're very, very nervous about the risks of travel. And for good reason, travel is quite vulnerable. Often you might not be familiar with the local area. And for that reason, people who can afford to do so will often travel with an entourage,

with a number of guards. I mean, for very elite Romans, that could be 30 enslaved people as a kind of cortege of guards to make sure that you're not going to be attacked. That's the daytime as well as nighttime. And this comes up in one of Cicero's cases where he is defending somebody accused of a murder on the roads outside Rome. And the part of the argument is actually about the size of the entourage, because if he'd gone without an entourage, it suggests he was up to no good. But they argued that, in fact, he had. These little details are really fascinating. fascinating but actually yeah i think all traveling together in quite large groups with armed guards is certainly one part of the picture of how people traveled if they could particularly if they were somewhere that wasn't already quite a busy road with lots of passers-by so it sounds like i said

so one opportunity for employment was as guards for people walking along these roads and say for travelers but also what did that does that hint at something else with these roads, Catherine? Were they a source of income, a source of employment for certain people? Were there people who were employed on the Roman roads? I mean, certainly all these places, like the changing stations, the service stations,

these need staffing. So they have staff. There's a military posting running the cursus publicus system. That is basically a government system. There are couriers and quite a lot of the couriers are enslaved. So there's a mix of enslaved labor and some free labor on these roads. Who exactly is delivering the services can be a bit of a question. There are certainly, there are also probably brothels on these roads. Certainly

later on, we get stories from some of the early saints' lives about how one saint was in fact, the son of a prostitute and whose mother ran an inn on one of the roads so there is a little bit of suggestion that perhaps there's a quite a wide variety of employment going on in this whole road infrastructure and last thing i wish i could also ask about the tombs and there were palaces and luxury buildings when they're overseeing these roads kind of showing off their the status of the individuals and massive tombs to remember people put on the roadside. And of course, also, sometimes there are punishments too, aren't there? Crucifixions and so on, placed on the roadside is almost a warning for people who'd rebelled or who were potentially thinking of rebelling against the Roman state not to do that. There were sometimes quite gruesome

public showings of what happened to people who defied Rome. Yeah, absolutely. So this is the story that after the Spartacus revolt, there were 6,000 rebels crucified along the Via Appia. And to what extent you can trust that figure is a whole question. But even if it was 600, I mean, that's an astonishing statement of public punishment that is really designed to threaten anybody who has even the slightest idea that they themselves are going to revolt in the future. So yeah, absolutely, the roads are really this space for display, for propaganda, for making statements. I mean, they're also the sites for that kind of demonstrative punishment. They're also sites for triumphs. Triumphal procession comes along the roads.

When St. Paul comes to Rome for his trial, he comes up the Via Appia and the Christians come out and greet him at different points on the Via Appia. So even when you're kind of the opponent in some way of the Roman authorities, you're kind of the opponent in some way of the Roman authorities, you're in trouble with the Roman authorities, you can still be on the road with your supporters making their point about their belief in what you're saying. So all sorts of things happen on the roads. They're not just functional, they have this really important cultural purpose too. Roads lead to Rome, as the expression goes, isn't it? Well, lastly, I could ask so many different questions, but you did mention St. Paul there, Catherine, and we have hinted at it earlier.

How important would you argue is the road system to the rise of Christianity? Certainly for people like St. Paul, but also for his followers, the road system allows them to get about and spread the message of Christ. I mean, a lot of St. Paul's journeys involved transport across the Mediterranean. I mean, it's not just road transport, the roads fit into a wider network, but absolutely, he is there, other Christians are there spreading that message along. And again, it's hard to know exactly what everybody's doing because we don't have lots and lots of detailed sources about how they got there, what exactly they did. But certainly, as the practice of pilgrimage grows up, we get an infrastructure alongside the traditional Roman infrastructure that is catering

specifically to Christians who are going to visit the Holy Land, who are going to visit Rome, which can in certain scenarios be a kind of alternative to the Holy Land. So I think, yeah, this becomes extraordinarily important. And it also becomes important because it gives another set of meanings to the roads to Rome. So some people in the centuries that follow talk about the roads to Rome as sites for Roman greatness, but other people will also talk about them as sites for Christian travellers. And these two narratives, these two sets of stories about the roads and why you make that journey to Rome sort of exist in parallel I mean right up to this present day right up to this present day and kind of to reaffirm that

fact isn't it Catherine that yes we've been talking about the roads and their importance to the Roman Empire but something we should also remember and you talk about it a lot in your book is of course the legacy of these constructions how they outlive the Romans and remain important and have been important for various peoples, important peoples and purposes down throughout the last couple of thousand years. Yeah, it's a network with an extraordinary legacy. I mean, I think partly because it was very monumental, you could still see milestones, you can still see the roads, you know, in the form of stones in the ground. They're very visible. You don't have to go very far anywhere in the territory of the former Roman Empire to find a

piece of road somewhere. And you could also still walk them. I mean, the Via Francigena, which is a pilgrim route, you can go from Canterbury to Rome in organized stages. It's set up as a European cultural route, but you can make arrangements for people to carry your luggage. And that crosses over with bits of Roman roads. So I walked along sort of 17 kilometers of Roman road, which is the former Via Cassia between Montefiascone and Viterbo to the north of Rome. It's a gorgeous walk. And a lot of people are really interested in this sort of slower travel today and bringing together those different layers of the past that you experience on these roads.

So yeah, it has a huge cultural legacy through Europe, I think, this Roman road network. Well, I'm glad you got the Via Cassia in there because I was slightly kicking myself for not asking you about it earlier because I know that was one of your favourite of all Roman roads, which is quite a topic in itself.

I mean, last but certainly not least, Catherine, it's a really exciting area of research for archaeology. You mentioned those roads in the east that are yet, there needs to be more work done on them, which is very exciting for the future. And also, whether it's in Wales today or elsewhere in the empire,

new Roman roads continue to be discovered. There is more, so much more to learn about the Roman roads continue to be discovered. There is so much more to learn about the Roman roads. It is absolutely incredible. When I was researching this book, my phone algorithm learned that I was interested in Roman roads. And practically every day, it would send me a news story about a Roman road that was being excavated somewhere across Europe. And it's just phenomenal. Do you know one of my favorite ones and a tip for anybody that might be going on holiday to Rome in the near future? It's just to the south of Rome at a place called Fratocchia. There's actually a

Roman road underneath a branch of McDonald's. And you can look down through a glass floor and you can go down some steps into the archaeological area and they've excavated this little side street really well preserved off the Via Appia and you can just sort of take a look at that piece of Roman road in situ and I just think it's such a fun idea that you can even be in a very sort of ordinary fast food restaurant go downstairs and there you have it, this piece of ancient archaeology. Well, there you go. You could be walking near Hadrian's Wall, or you could be in that McDonald's and looking down, or you could be walking through central Petra in Jordan and the

colonnaded street, thousands of miles apart, and yet the thing that connects them are the remains of Roman roads. Catherine, this has been absolutely fantastic. Last but certainly not least, you have written a massive new book all about the story of the Roman roads. Yes, it's The Roads to Rome, a history. It's out on the 13th of June. And I follow this tale from the ancient world through those tales of medieval pilgrims, through the Renaissance and up right to the present day and right through sort of Second Worldims through the Renaissance and up right to the present day and right through sort of Second World War where the Allies are fighting their way up the Via Appia trying to liberate Rome. So an incredible sort of spread of history and

absolutely fascinating for me to sort of follow through and I hope that some of you might enjoy it too. Sure they will. Catherine, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. You're welcome. Well, there you go. There was Dr Catherine Fletcher talking all things the Roman roads. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

It's about time we covered this critical part of infrastructure to sustaining the Roman Empire that stretched from northern Britain to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Last thing from me, wherever you are listening to the podcast, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the ancients, so that you do not miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.